Simple but enough powerful. Has potential for further enhancements and room for new features and options. Will impatiently wait new updates with new added capabilities. Thank you developer for his time and effort!
Awesome, quick install, restart VS and adds "Theme" to your toolbar. I wanted this for big visual clue of what solution I was looking at when I have a lot open, when one VS window is green and the other is brown, it's pretty obvious.
Just some feedback on some of the colors. I use the "tan" scheme as a base and found everything great other than two issues that I fixed locally. I suspect they may be issues in other base schemes.
1) Scroll bar handle when not selected has almost no contrast to the background of the scroll bar which makes it very hard to find the handle to move it. When selected it becomes darker and there is more contrast but this is the opposite of when you need contrast.
2) In various places VS uses boxes around "toggle" objects to indicate the're selected. For instance the "Match case" toggle on the find/replace pop up. These boxes, again at least in "Tan", have almost no contrast to the background color so it's very easy to make mistakes.
Awesome plugin! Is there a mapping/explanation of what each name represents? (ie What is SortText?). When trying to customize it seems you have to either know what everything maps to already, or you have to apply one change at a time and see if that was the item you were hoping for.
I really like this plugin, but it's possible to add a new option? Change theme by project. When you load a project, the theme can be change in the same moment.
In my job, I have to debug 3 differents versions. That can be help to have a different theme for eatch project
There were some themes and when I change them then the background of menu changes, but when I try to use the "Customize colors" I cannot change it, it is possible to change some another backgrounds, but not the menu.
I've created a (freeware) app that lets you create VS themes quickly by letting you select lots of colours and, for example, randomize a particular channel.
The zip also includes 3 themes. I've put it at http://www.filedude.com/download/7g4YH3FRpQb0c76202d2.
Sorry if I'm breaking some rule by putting this link here. Not sure how to share my app.
Hi Mat, been looking forever for something like that, installed it immediately, only to find out the extension menu doesn't show. Tried to find that 'allow-non-admin' option (advice by Ryan Molden, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2010/01/04/changing-visual-studio-s-color-palette.aspx) in Tools>Option and could not.
Tried to run VS as admin - still not good enough... Any ideas?
My config is win7 x64, VS10 over VS08 (side by side). Perhaps an interesting detail would be that due to space limitations, had to install VS10 on 'D' drive, while VS08 is on 'C' drive.
Does the extension show up at all in the Extension Manager (Tools\Extension Manager)? It should NOT say [Disabled] next to the name. Selecting it should show Disable and Uninstall buttons next to the extension. Alternatively, you can check to see if the extension is installed by verifying that the folder "%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions\Microsoft\Visual Studio Color Theme Editor\1.3" exists and has several files in it (including ThemeManagerPackage.dll).
If it does show up in the extension manager and is enabled, but doesn't work, I'll follow up with you to find out some more things. Hopefully this is the issue though!
Hello again, somehow MSDN site cut me off in the middle of transmission and later did not allow me to login.. Anyways, let me try again the post.
The extension is both installed and enabled; files are where they are supposed to be, here is their listing:
extension.vsixmanifest
ThemeManagerIcon.png
ThemeManagerPackage.dll
ThemeManagerPackage.pkgdef
ThemeManagerPreview.png
ThemeManagerUI.dll
VsColorManager.dll
And, since I really like (need, actually) that extension, tried uninstall VS10, cleanup C drive, re-install in C (boy, that was tedious, mildly put). Too bad, no effect, exactly same behavior.
P.S. Forgot to add that running "devenv.exe /log" produced no entries in log containing any of the listed files; nor did "devenv.exe /setup" help in any way.. :(
I'm sorry to hear that (and sorry for the delay)! Can you try this?
1. Go to Tools\Customize
2. Change to the Commands tab
3. Choose "Add New Menu"
4. Select the "New Menu" that was just created from the "Menu bar:" dropdown
5. Choose "Add Command..."
6. In the command list, there should be a category called "Theme" and there should be two commands in it. "cmdidDynamicThemeList" is the list of themes, and "cmdidThemeCustom" is the "Customize" command.
If the "Theme" category doesn't show up at all, can you verify if "Theme Manager 1.0" shows up in Help\About Microsoft Visual Studio's list of installed products? Showing up in that list should at least indicate that the extension did load successfully.
The Theme bar does not show up for me as well.
-The extension is appears in the extension manager and is not disabled.
-%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions\Microsoft\Visual Studio Color Theme Editor\1.3 exists and is populated with the same files as Asparuh.
-It does not appear in the help box.
-The themes category does not exist in the command list.
I am using Windows 7 x64 Enterprise with Visual Studios 2010 Professional.
Is this extension still supported?
I wonder if you might both be hitting a bug in Visual Studio itself. Normally, when an extension is installed, Visual Studio's menu cache is invalidated, and Visual Studio rebuilds the cache to include menu items added by the extension. If that step didn't happen for some reason, it could explain why you don't see the extension's menu.
Can you try running "devenv /setup" from a Visual Studio 2010 command prompt? This command runs setup-type activities (like rebuilding the command cache), and shouldn't take more than a minute to complete. It also should not affect any of your user settings.
Hopefully this helps--I'm running out of ideas for why this doesn't work only a small percentage of the time.
Hi All,
I had the theme manager installed on a previous dev machine, and loved it. I'm building out a new machine, and when I downloaded the vsix and ran it, I got a message that said "This file is not a valid vsix package". I then opened the vsix in notepad, to find that its contents were that of an HTML response, and they read:
<html>
<head id="Head1"><title>
Error
</title></head>
<body>
<div>
An error occurred while processing your request.
</div>
</body>
</html>
Any ideas?
Frank
Hi Again,
So this seems odd, but when I tried the download in IE 8 it worked fine. Was orginally trying the download from FireFox.
Thank god I'm not stuck with that terrible default theme!
Frank
VS "Windows Classic" theme (Win7; Aero theme):
- please fix ToolWindowButtonInactiveGlyph (used by small triangle expandung list with tabs that did not fit) to distinct from background (e.g. to 404040)
- the background of the search textbox in "customize colors" dialog is darknavy. Text, of course, is black:(
Thanks for pointing out the problem with ToolWindowButtonInactiveGlyph! I'll fix this internally, but I probably won't push a new release with just this change since you can work around it by creating a copy of the Windows Classic theme and change the color yourself.
For the dark navy search textbox background, did you manually change the color of SearchBoxBackground? By default, it should still be White in the Windows Classic theme. The text is currently using the system's Window Text color (because there's sadly not a SearchBoxText color defined), so if you do change the color of SearchBoxBackground, it needs to be something that will work well with SystemColors.WindowText.
1) Thanks!
2) Mea culpa. I contrive to change SearchBoxBackground without notifying my mind. Beg pardon!
Also (asked earlier): what colors affect on inactive (not selected) tab's border/background? I've found nothing but FileTab* (FileTabGradientDark, FileTabGradientLight...), but they have no effect.
There's no way (short of installing the Productivity Power Tools extension and using the Document Well 2010 Plus) to make the non-selected tabs have a color when you're not hovering over them. If you want to customize the hover-over color, that would be FileTabHotBorder, FileTabHotGradientBottom, and FileTabHotGradientTop. If you do install the Productivity Power Tools, you can change the tab colors through the Tools\Options\Productivity Power Tools\Document Tab Well options page.
Hey Matthew,
I used your tool to create a pretty awesome dark theme. Here it is: http://www.sharepoint.bg/radi/post/Pimp-Your-IDE-Visual-Studio-2010-Themes-and-Skins.aspx
Thanks for the great work.
Radi A.
Hi,
cool Theme. I worked some time with the expression theme but, in the source control u couldn't see a different between text an window.
But with that theme it works pretty fine.
Love the addon, couldn't live without it. However some UI elements can be quite tricky to customise, in that their name is non-obvious in the list, or the element derives its styling from some other unrelated element. Would it be possible to add a Photoshop-style eye dropper tool to enable hovering over a particular UI element which then highlights it in the list?
Ah, have just discovered a workaround. Acquire the color value of the element via a screenshot loaded into a graphics program, then search for that value in the Customise Colors menu.
I noticed that color scheme for the document tabs are different for files in the active solution than for other source files (on my machine at least). Is anyone else seeing this behavior? If so, can someone point me to the right set of colors to edit so that I can make the different categories of tabs look the same?
Great extension BTW! I couldn't stand the default color scheme in VS10. I'm using the "Expression" theme from Zuhaib.Z with some tweaks right now and I love it.
The Pro Power Tools comes with an extension called Document Well Plus, and by default it will change document tab colors. Are you using that extension as well? If so, I believe you'll have to customize your colors for tabs in Tools\Options under Environment\Document Tab Well (you can uncheck Color Tabs By Project, or you can change the colors under Environment\Document Tab Well\Color Coding).
Can window tab's, e.g. the selected tab, be changed?
Which item in the list is it? I don't see any color looking like the window tab color (aero theme).
The Pro Power Tools comes with an extension called Document Well Plus, and by default it will change document tab colors. Are you using that extension as well? If so, I believe you'll have to customize your colors for tabs in Tools\Options under Environment\Document Tab Well (you can uncheck Color Tabs By Project, or you can change the colors under Environment\Document Tab Well\Color Coding).
